1. Field
This disclosure is generally related to data mining. More specifically, this disclosure is related to methods and apparatus for performing association mining based in part on contextual information.
2. Related Art
An advertising agency typically designs an advertising campaign so that it appeals to a particular demographic, and deploys the advertisement across media channels that are associated with the target demographic. For example, an advertisement for sporting apparel will likely be designed to appeal to young people with active lifestyles, and will likely be deployed across sports-related magazines, television channels, and/or web pages.
Some retail companies improve on targeted advertising by targeting an advertisement to an individual's current purchase history. For example, an online retail company such as Amazon.com, or a large supermarket chain, can mine its transaction database to detect correlations between seemingly disparate products. Then, when a customer selects an item to purchase, the customer can be presented with an advertisement or a coupon related to another item which has been determined to be correlated with the selected item.
Unfortunately, these retail companies need to gather a large purchase history over an extended period of time to store enough transaction information to determine a correlation to a given product. Therefore, when a new product is made available, the retail company will find it difficult to determine how it should perform targeted advertising for this new product. Furthermore, marketing firms and small retail companies oftentimes do not have access to enough transaction information to develop a high-quality targeted advertising campaign.